Kimi K2.6 runs agents for days — and exposes the limits of enterprise orchestration

Most orchestration frameworks were built for agents that run for seconds or minutes. Now that agents are running for hour s — and in some cases days — those frameworks are starting to crack. Several model providers, such as Anthropic with Claude Code and OpenAI with Codex, introduced early support for long-horizon agents through multi-session tasks, subagents and background execution. However, these systems sometimes assume agents are still operating within bounded-time workflows even when they run for extended periods. Open-source model provider Moonshot AI wants to push beyond that with its new model, Kimi K2.6. Moonshot says the model is designed for continuous execution, with internal use cases including agents that ran for hours and, in one case, five straight days, handling monitoring and incident response autonomously. But this growing use of this type of agent is exposing a critical gap in orchestration: most orchestration frameworks were not designed for this type of continuous, stateful execution. Open-source models, such as Kimi K2.6, that rely on agent swarms are making the case that their orchestration approach comes close to managing stateful agents. The difficulties of orchestrating long-running agents While it is true that some enterprises would rather bring their own orchestration frameworks to their agentic ecosystem, model providers and agent platforms recognize that offering agent management remains a competitive advantage. Other model providers have begun exploring long-running agents, many through multi-session tasks and background execution. For example, Anthropic’s Claude Code orchestrates agents with a lead agent that directs other agents based on a set of user-instructed definitions. OpenAI’s Codex runs similarly . Kimi K2.6 approaches orchestration with an improved version of its Agent Swarms, capable of managing up to 300 sub-agents “executing across 4,000 coordinated steps simultaneously,” Moonshot AI wrote in a blog post . Compared to …